blog.eliduke.com

for those of you who don’t already know, i’ve finally made it to christchurch, new zealand. i’ve been here for about 3 days now, and should be departing for McMurdo tomorrow morning.

yesterday (wednesday) during our extreme cold weather gear fitting session, we were told that our scheduled ice flight the following morning (thursday) had been rescheduled to friday at 7:15am. they told us that we could come by the next morning between 9 and 10am to pick up more travel funds. by the time we all got back to our hotel rooms, however, that schedule had been canceled and we were back to our original schedule: thursday at 7:15am. just before going to bed that night we were notified that it had been moved up 2 hours to 9:15am. we all woke up the next morning (thursday) to find out that the flight had been canceled (again) and we were re-scheduled for friday morning. it’s all a bit ridiculous if you ask me.

so, we organized ourselves and took the bus over to the travel offices to pick up more travel funds for the extra day in christchurch. i was quite surprised to find out that we were getting an extra $230 Kiwi (about $200 US) for just 1 extra day, but i certainly wasn’t complaining. a few of the other guys and i grabbed our money and headed over to the airport to rent a van. one of the other guys had already rented one van, so with one more added, that gave us a carrying capacity of about 16 people. we managed to find 15 people that wanted to go, so we loaded up 2 the vans and headed north to Hanmer Springs (about 125 km from christchurch). i was really excited to drive a right handed car on the left side of the road, so about half way there we switched and i started driving.

i really enjoyed driving in this new system, but i just couldn’t get the hang of the right handed turn signal and the left handed windshield wipers. i kept shutting off the wipers when i wanted to turn right. our caravan stayed pretty tight the whole way there, but near the end of the drive there was a white truck in the middle of the 2 vans.

about 25 km from the hot springs we came up over a hill and all of a sudden there was a small red car in the left lane headed straight toward us. the red car was trying to pass a large bus and just was not pulling it off in time. i slammed on the breaks and swerved toward the shoulder to the left. the red car swerved to it’s left just in time to slip back into the right lane where it was supposed to be. just as we were breathing a sigh of relief, the white truck that was between the 2 vans slammed into the back of the van i was driving and pushed us off the road into the ditch. shit! that was crazy!

everyone in the car was fine, just a little bit of whip-lash. we got out of the car and talked with the driver of the white truck. he called the police. a few minutes later a young couple who was in the pack of cars going the other direction pulled up and said that they witnessed the whole thing and had actually caught the license plate number of the little red car. the driver of the bus that was being passed also stopped to be a witness as well. we all hung out on the side of the road for about 90 minutes waiting for the police before we decided to just exchange info and deal with it later.

we continued on to Hanmer Springs and arrived around 3pm. the springs were really cool. it was $10 Kiwi for general admission, and matt and i paid the additional $5 for the water slides. we hung out in the pools, ranging from 29 to 42 degrees celcius, and also went down the water slides. it was very relaxing and bunches of fun.

we just arrived back at the YMCA in christchurch an hour ago (10pm) to find out that we have to check in at the airport tomorrow at 6am. the rental car offices don’t open until 6am, so we are going to have to finagle something so we can get that all straightened out before leaving for antarctica for 5 months.

i’ll write again from the ice.